#464 Dust to Dust

The other day I was wondering. I do that a lot. It starts with little stuff, which leads me to other stuff, which gets me even further into what I call obsessive wondering. O. W. for the uninitiated. O.W. is like other obsessive-compulsive disorders except it seems to infect geeks, philosophers, daydreamers, and home inventors. It’s better than O.C. though, cause you can pronounce O.W. OW. As in, my brain hurts from all this wondering. So one of the things I was wondering was: What is the scratch stuff made up of that you scratch off a lottery ticket? As I’m sure you know, every lottery scratch ticket is a multi-colored extravaganza of graphic indulgence. Bright reds, brilliant blues, passionate purples. Lottery tickets are definitely not for kids. And every scratch ticket is actually two layers, the painted on scratch layer and the backing, on which is printed the prize. The paint layer also has two regions. The place where the paint can be scratched off and the place where the paint is permanent. It’s hard to tell which is which till you start scratching. And once you start scratching, here comes the scratch dust. The little flakes of paint that peel off and go who knows where. I first noticed them when I was experimenting with a scratch ticket in my home and I chanced to scratch it on a lighter surface. The little flakes of paint and dye piled up in the area where I was scratching with toxic abandon. When I tried to brush them off afterwards, some of them went easily but others stuck to my table, only to be removed when I wiped them away with a damp cloth. Which promptly got stained with multicolored blobs of scratch paint. So I’m asking the question. Has anyone done a study on the environmental impact of lottery scratch dust? The toxic things that are killing us are in the little stuff we take for granted—lead glaze in Mexican pottery, small-parted toys that children choke on, toothpaste tubes made of lead, Poprocks. Is lottery scratch dust made of lead? It feels and smears like it’s lead-based. Is it acrylic or oil based? The landfills are filled with old oil based paint cans in partial states of deadly decomposition. I mean, I’m not that worried about me. I’m worried about the poor clerks in the convenience stores who have to scratch off all the secret codes on every lottery ticket they take in for redemption. They’re probably sucking in more toxic particles than a dentist drilling out an old mercury filling. All that paint and dye has to go somewhere when you stir it up with vigorous scratching. If nothing else, it’s killing off the friendly dust mites that normally consume our skin flakes and dandruff. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that, but black lung and asbestosis happened from stuff we once thought was relatively safe to inhale. What next, scratch ‘em-physema? Lotto lung? Give a whole new meaning to coughing up for some lottery tickets.
America, ya gotta love it